In the months leading up to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West German organizers asked [Georg] Sieber, then a 39-year-old police psychologist, to “tabletop” the event, as security experts call the exercise of sketching out worst-case scenarios.

. . . . To Sieber, every terrorist organization has an M.O. that makes it a kind of text to be read. With the Black September faction of the PLO he hardly had to read between the lines. “I was simply trying to answer the question, If they were to do it, how would they do it?”

. . . . There was only one problem with Sieber's “situations.” To guard against them, organizers would have to scrap plans to stage the Games they had been planning for years -- a sporting jubilee to repudiate the last Olympics on German soil, the 1936 Nazi Games in Berlin. The Munich Olympics were to be “the Carefree Games.” There would be no place for barbed wire, troops or police bristling with sidearms. Why, at an Olympic test event at Munich's Dante Stadium in 1971, when police deployed nothing more menacing than German shepherds, foreign journalists had teed off on the organizers, accusing them of forgetting that Dachau lay only 12 miles away. Nein, the organizers came to agree, where Berlin had been festooned with swastikas and totalitarian red, Munich would feature a one-worldish logo and pastel bunting. . . .

The organizers asked Sieber if he might get back to them with less-frightful scenarios -- threats better scaled to the Games they intended to stage.

One reason the wounds are still raw is the callous behavior of the IOC:

In their negligence suit the families of the victims charged that saving the hostages became subordinate to Brundage's desire to remove the crisis from the Olympic Village. Wegener suggests as much. “The Village,” he says, “was like a church, a cathedral.” It was almost as if the Germans had said, There's no way we can save the hostages. Let's at least save the Games.

. . . . after a memorial service on Sept. 6, the Carefree Games resumed. Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's soccer match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, while authorities did nothing to intervene in the name of decorum. Yet when several spectators unfurled a banner reading “17 dead, already forgotten” security officers seized the sign and expelled the offenders from the grounds.

It's part of the protocol of every Olympics that organizers shall publish an official report of great scope and heft. Munich's is Teutonically comprehensive. It praises Mark Spitz for his feats in the pool and Olga Korbut for hers on the mats, and the informal Olympic Village for its contribution to the relaxed spirit of the Games. And it recounts the atrocities perpetrated on members of the Israeli delegation in dispassionate, mostly exculpatory prose. Then it adds this grotesque rationalization:

After the terrible events of September 5, 1972, it was once again the atmosphere of the Olympic Village which contributed a great deal to calming down and preserving peace among the athletes.

According to George Jonas' book Vengeance, on the day following the massacre, all of the flags at the Olympics were lowered to half-mast as a gesture of mourning. Delegates from the Arab states complained and the organizers promptly returned their flags to the top of the flagpoles.

In 2004, in Athens, IOC President Jacques Rogge - himself an athlete in 1972 - participated in a commemoration of the massacre, but when widows Romano and Spitzer seek an official commemoration at the Games themselves, the IOC replies that this could alienate other members of the Olympic community.

In their negligence suit the families of the victims argued that the Germans should have anticipated some attack. If it wasn't enough that Georg Sieber laid out the entire plan, Black September had staged five operations in Europe over the previous 10 months, including three in West Germany. The families also allege that German intelligence had received at least three reports between Aug. 21 and Sept. 2 of Palestinian terrorists flowing into the region.

Early in 2001 the Germans, who the families say had for years denied that a report on the disaster even existed, finally settled with the families, offering a pool of $3 million in compensation, to be paid out in equal thirds by the German, Bavarian and Munich governments. (This was in addition to bereavement funds of $1 million doled out by the German Red Cross in the immediate aftermath of the attack.) But the families have yet to receive any money from this “humanitarian” fund, and they believe the Germans haven't released all the evidence that exists. Moreover, they still wait for an expression of remorse or responsibility. “If they would only say to us, 'Look, we tried, we didn't know what we were doing, we didn't mean for what happened to happen, we're sorry' — that would be the end of it,” says Ankie Spitzer, fencing coach André's widow. “But they've never even said that.”

More details come to light in “One Day in September”:

On the German side, while some bungled the rescue effort, others proved heroes. One is the federal interior minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, who offered to take the hostages' place and tried to explain to Isa, the head terrorist, that Germany, because of its past, had a special responsibility for the safety of Jews.

The two-year research digging by Cohn's team also produced some startling revelations. One concerns an early rescue attempt by German police volunteers to infiltrate the hostage quarters from the roof and through utility ducts. The rescue, it is now revealed, was foiled by agents attached to the Communist East German team, who filmed the operation from an opposite building and, through sophisticated communication techniques, transmitted the deployment of the police to the terrorists.

Cohn considers it unfair to fault German intentions in trying to save the Israelis. . . . Rather, he assigns much of the blame to the International Olympic Committee, which pressured the Germans into hasty and ill-prepared action, so that the Olympic Village could be cleared and the athletic events resumed after the unpleasant interruption.

Jim McKay was the anchor for ABC Sports' coverage of the Olympic Games in Munich.

My whole family was in Munich. Our son had to go home, but our daughter stayed and she was at the fence when the heli took off. And she said it looked so close you could almost touch them, but there's nothing anyone could do in the end. And, of course, there wasn't.

These were athletes in the old Olympic tradition. They were amateurs. Almost from the first minute I was on the air, I thought about a young man named David Berger, who had immigrated to Israel because he wanted to be in the Olympic. It just made the whole thing worse and worse. . . . I realized in the end, I am going to be the person who is going to tell David Berger's family whether he is alive or dead.

. . . . A wire service reported that night that all the hostages had been saved. But German TV was wrong. Saying the words, “They're all gone” was the hardest thing I had to do in television.

His 17 year old son was in the control room with him when the hostages were taken. That son, Sean McManus, is now President of both CBS News and CBS Sports.

Jim McKay's boss, Roone Arledge, wrote a memoir of the event

“Looks very dark for hostages,” I whispered into his earpiece. “Announcement soon. Don't get their hopes up.”

We kept waiting for word. Fifteen minutes ... 30 ... 45. At Olympic headquarters, they were reviewing the day for the media in half-hour increments, halting between each one for French, then English translation. German thoroughness, God almighty! Finally, at 3:17 a.m., Reuters removed all our doubts.

“FLASH! ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES SEIZED BY ARAB GUERRILLAS KILLED.”

We could go with it. “Official,” I whispered to Jim. “All hostages dead.”

He turned to look straight into the camera. For the first time that day, he appeared truly tired. “I've just gotten the final word,” he said. “When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears were realized tonight....” He paused. Then, “They're all gone.”